Tilting at the Windmills of My Mind…

As Pandora’s Pets are not made singly, except in the case of a commission, it isn’t so easy to say precisely how long each takes to make. They take as long as they need. Their creation is a collaborative process with Leanna Renee Hieber, who gives them their individual details and augments their personalities. We haven’t precisely timed that process either.

When each is finished as a work of art, they’re not fully complete until a customer adopts them. There’s a procedure when each is sold that we consider vital. Every one of Pandora’s Pets needs a name. We keep a record of the name of each Pet.

To be honest, however, I didn’t want to have a list containing common or ridiculous appellations. This meant there needed to be a process. Within the lore of Pandora’s Pets they’re meant to be quite ancient, somewhat otherworldly creatures. What follows is a (mostly) complete account of how the naming chart was created (in January of this year); this isn’t entirely random facts:

circa 3800 BC Ur was a Sumerian city-state and served the Mesopotamian culture as an important port. Since the end of that period, silting of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have added almost 200 miles of land between the Great Ziggurat and the Persian Gulf. At its peak, however, Ur was immense in terms of both scale and splendor.

c. 832 BC The First Temple in Jerusalem is begun. Myths about its construction probably began about this time, too.

c. 1100 The Scots adopted the word glomung from Old English. It became gloaming and still means twilight or dusk. In some parts of Scotland it may also mean dawn.

1583 By this time, the esoterica about King Solomon‘s included the recruitment of 72 spirits, each of whom had special talents. Johann Weyer and others attempted to list them all. The lists don’t match at every point.

Thinking about these things and along these lines produced the following chart:

d20:

—

Name

—

Tribe

1

Kut(h)-

-as(h)/es(h)-

-tis

Chill

2

Tel-

-par/pur-

-lor

Pitch

3

Ur-

-kah-

-tos

Murky

4

Kis(h)-

-el-

-ax

Shade

5

Der-

-gaht-

-far

Ghast

6

Ad-

-veh-

-ur

Wight

7

Jem-

-ix-

-as

Ghoul

8

Eri-

-ib-

-for

Brood

9

Ak-

-daht-

-par

Gloom

10

Es(h)-

-sal-

-eth

Frost

11

Gir-

-o-

-gos

Gaunt

12

Lag-

-bey-

-las

Weird

13

Lar-

-mu-

-mon

Cloak

14

Shu–

-ru-

-ius

Bleak

15

Har-

-neh-

-ith

Ghost

16

Din-

-day-

-son

Dread

17

Bad-

-ara-

-thin

Haunt

18

Is(h)-

-tra-

-ion

Eerie

19

Kua-

-euh-

-eus

Qualm

20

Bad-

-has-

-os

Cloud

Column № 1 – represents the result on a 20-sided die. A different, color-coded die is used for each subsequent column at point-of-sale.
Column № 2 – The names of some of civilization’s most ancient settlements (or syllables thence) became the prefix for each Pet’s name – to suggest extreme age.
Column № 3 – The middle of each Pet’s first name is pure invention to serve as a bridge.
Column № 4 – The suffix of about thirty percent of Solomon’s helpers are also suffix for the Pets.
Column № 5 – The Tribes to which each Pet may belong are called by synonyms of gloam and other spooky 5-letter words.

The next batch of Pandora’s Pets will mean there are more than 100 of them in the world! As making them helps both Ms. Hieber and I smile – and then the people to whom they’re offered for sale – that’s an already uncountable number of smiles that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Note: While making this post ready my entire computer froze. I’m attributing the smile that resulted from not having to start over to the Pets as well.